Benchwarmer Baseball Rules

14.0 Schedule and Deadlines

There's a double bind in setting the transaction dates. By
conducting the transactions at the beginning of each Major
League week (starting with Opening Day), early-season off dates
and rainouts cause the Benchwarmer season to be delayed at
times. The effect is that the gap between when lineups are
issued and when they actually count grows pretty large.

On the reverse side, to start transactions a week later
would mean that at the end of the season, by the time the
Major League games catch up, Benchwarmer lineups would be
due after the actual games that they use are already played.

BWB is played in 6-game weeks. MLB teams often play
7 games in a week, so it wouldn't take long for BWB's
transaction date to get out of whack with the real schedule
if we were to use the same deadline throughout the season.

To try to be fairer to owners at both ends of the season,
Benchwarmer Baseball changes the deadline day throughout
the season.

The first week's deadline will be on the
Sunday at the end of the first full week of the Major League season.

This is roughly about the day most MLB teams
will be playing game 5 or 6.

Some pitching performances will already be known, but that
shouldn't have too much of an effect.

The deadline will
remain on Sunday for the next four weeks after that.

Then, for weeks
6-10, the deadline will be on Saturday.

For each fifth of
the season, the deadline will move one day earlier until, by
the final five weeks of the season, Wednesday will be used for
the deadline day.

Deadline times are generally set up to
be at the time of the first MLB game of the day, but to get
some consistency, starting in 2016 we'll have a consistent
time by day:

For Saturday and Sunday deadlines, many or most (on
Sundays) teams play at around 1 PM local time, so the
deadline time will be 1 PM Eastern.

For Wednesday-Friday deadlines, all deadline times
will be set no earlier than 7 PM Eastern. There
will often be afternoon games, but since it's not a
perfect match anyway, we'll opt for consistency.

In some situations (e.g., trade deadline, extension
deadline), deadline times may be moved back to later in
the day/evening.

Each season, the schedule will be posted both for all the
games and for the transaction and lineup deadlines that
occur throughout the summer. See the
Transaction Deadlines page for more details.

Key Schedule and Deadline points

Transaction/Lineup Week

Event

0

Teams in
returning leagues must have cash balance at or below
5000

0

Transaction order shifts back to pre-season order

0

Teams
must have a complete roster after this week's
transactions

1

Lineups
required for first games

15

Final
week for salary rebate for cut players

15

Prorated
salary for free agent signings does not decrease
after this week - you pay 40% of the salary for
signings the remainder of the season.

17

Final
week for multiyear contract signings. (Changed
in 2015 - had been final week in July)

20

Final
week for trades. (Changed in 2015 - had been
final week in August)

24

Final
week for free agent signings

25

Cuts/IR
moves only

26

In
preparation for playoffs, cuts and IR moves are now
allowed (as of 2015 season)